The Little Things

I'm no great expert on our freight rail network, but the reason we have a Soviet-style rail network in much of the country is that the freight companies control the tracks. So the question becomes what kind of relatively small improvements - adding electrification, double and triple tracking in segments to allow for more passing, rerouting the freight by adding new segments, etc... - can lead to significant significant improvements in average speed and reliability. This is basically the point of most of the Obama adminsitration's "High Speed Rail" plan, which mostly isn't high speed rail in the sense that TGV, the Eurostar, or the AVE are, but instead "high speed" in the sense of making the improvements to get top speeds up to 110 MPH and average speeds up to... well, something hopefully significantly higher than they are. In other words, it's about restoring the quality of some rail routes that we had in 1920.